


To Please the Dead

by RobinLorin



Series: This Too Too Solid Flesh [1]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Beauregard Lionett & Caleb Widogast Friendship, Body Swap, Caleb Widogast is a Mess, Gen, Nonconsentual Magic Use, Resurrection, being Known by someone who loves you more than you love yourself, feat. Widogast brand self loathing, learning how to be a literal new person, trans themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-27
Updated: 2020-07-14
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:34:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24938395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RobinLorin/pseuds/RobinLorin
Summary: Bren doesn’t remember being gone. It might have been the afterlife. His soul might have been held by the gods, or batted about like a ball by a fae cat. He might have been dead, spiritually dead, with his body left behind to slowly die and then join his spirit.He wouldn’t have cause to wonder, except that Astrid pulled him back.
Relationships: Astrid & Caleb Widogast, Beauregard Lionett & Caleb Widogast, Nott | Veth Brenatto & Caleb Widogast
Series: This Too Too Solid Flesh [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1805614
Comments: 8
Kudos: 68





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, my obsession with The Untamed has officially led me to write fic about other fandoms. I just barely stopped it from becoming a complete crossover. 
> 
> Warning for non-graphic vomiting, and some body dysphoria.

**"We have only a little time to please the living. But all eternity to love the dead." - _Antigone_**

He doesn’t remember being… gone. There is only the returning, as a deep sleeper only knows he has been away when he returns to wakefulness. 

A voice says, “I’m sorry to call you back like this.” 

He opens his eyes, the name of that speaker on his tongue. A breeze carries the scent of wild heather past his cheek. 

Bren wakes up in the middle of a delicately painted circle on the floor. 

Mud is the cheapest disguise. It lasts longer than any spell and it’s available anywhere he travels. Plus, it’s free. 

Bren steals a shirt from a clothing line. He sweats this one through within days. Waking up sweating, wanting to scream, sets an odor into the pits. He doesn’t find a new one. 

He lets his -- Astrid's -- hair grow long. They must have cut it at the asylum, for it was on its way to a choppy fringe that spoke to a utilitarian cut once every few weeks. He lets it grow, lets sweat collect at the base of his neck, lets twigs roll into the back when he rises from the ground each morning. 

The bandages and the coat he devotes special care to. 

The coat, obviously, must have places for each component. The honey must not mingle with the bat guano. The style does not matter, it is the inside that counts. This makes stealing it a bit difficult; Bren cannot snatch any old jacket off a line or shop’s rack. He must linger, dipping his fingers into each coat’s lining, catching the attention of the shopkeep or any nosy customer who might notice him. It takes him weeks to find, and take, the right one. 

The bandages are for his arm. 

He doesn’t remember being gone. It might have been the afterlife. His soul might have been held by the gods, or batted about like a ball by a fae cat. He might have been dead, spiritually dead, with his body left behind to slowly die and then join him. 

He wouldn’t have cause to wonder, except that Astrid pulled him back. 

Astrid’s body is not allergic to milk. Astrid’s body likes bread (not different from Bren’s body, but notable nonetheless). Astrid’s calves cramp easily. Astrid’s uterus bleeds approximately three days out of each seventy days. Astrid's jaw is quick to clench unconsciously. He remembers the gleam of her eyes and wonders if they still shine like this when he is talking passionately about spells. Or Frumpkin. 

Astrid’s memory is not worse than Bren’s -- they were both geniuses -- but it is different. He no longer needs to fit every memory into the appropriate box and label it precisely. Each piece of knowledge simply comes when he calls it, and it is both pleasing and overwhelming. He has not learned how to stop calling the memories of some things he would rather box away. 

He knows the ritual from Astrid’s research. Before Professor Ikathon snaps them up, Astrid petitions their professors to let her write her presentation essay on Jongwon rituals. At a time when the only zealous light in her eyes is the fevered interest of an academic. 

She is fourteen and full of ideas. 

Bren and Eodwulf have to drag her out of the library for meals, and even then she stuffs the food in her cheek, like a squirrel, and speaks around it. The things she speaks of. Ghosts, talismans, runes that could be written in the air, codes that capture and control spirits. 

At night, Bren takes out Astrid’s book from its place under his left armpit. He studies the spell she used to bring him back. He writes his own notes. He tries to complete her unfinished speculations. He always enjoyed being her mirror, letting her pour out ideas for him to critique. 

Sometimes he revisits the page she left open for him in the asylum. 

_Don’t let them catch you._

On those nights he writes to her. He assures her that he has obeyed her thus far. 

Untold miles from the asylum, he curls up in the hollow of a dead tree. His new legs twinge and flare as the muscles cool. His new armpits reek of fear. 

He remembers. 

He cannot scream. He cannot scream. He cannot be found. 

He bites down on the meat of his own hand -- not his, not anymore. These teeth are too blunt to tear his flesh apart. He wants to rend this body to the wind, wants to reach inside himself and tear his bones out. He settles for gouging his hand with his teeth. His eyes are wide. He sees the memory play out in front of him on the forest floor: he is fifteen, standing at the top of the stairs while his mother and father speak in front of the homely fire. 

They are talking of treason. They are talking of their son. How proud they are. How much he’s grown. 

He vomits onto his hand. His teeth are not his and they do not respond to him, they do not let go of his hand and he sits there, rocking back and forth on his twitching legs, soaked in vomit and sweat and remembering both memories. He knows which one is real now. This is not something he can come back from. 

He wonders what Astrid remembered. 

“There was a woman in the hospital,” he says. This is the only time he omits a fact to Beau and Nott, in his confession that night in the hotel with a skeleton in its basement. The candle Nott has lit burns steadily on the dresser. Caleb watches tears form in the heat of the flame and drop away to freeze into more wax. 

He has told his compatriots this much, but Astrid’s part of the story is not his to tell. 

“She took away the clouds,” he says. 

His panic subsides after some unknown space of time. Bren cleans off the vomit. He finds a suitable tree hollow and covers himself in underbrush. He half-sleeps through the night, terrified of every sound. It is only when morning comes that he realizes he is bleeding. 

Five deep gouges line his left arm. Evenly spaced. Deliberate. They are not scratches from fingernails. It is as if the skin has simply opened itself up, in a wish to resemble a deep valley or ruts dug for planting. They are bleeding slowly; too slowly for such deep wounds. He dabs at the overflowed blood with his hospital clothes. None more wells up, as it should. 

He wraps the arm with cloth torn from his shirt, and continues to put more distance between him and the asylum. 

Caleb says, “I was Bren Aldric Ermenrud.” 

Caleb says, “Astrid was the woman in the hospital.” 

He looks around the group of unlikely people who have won his… his loyalty. Love. The Nott in his head says _Don’t mince words, they’re your friends._

The Nott sitting across from him looks like she might throw up. From excitement or from reliving her death, he doesn’t know. They are less than a mile from the river where she drowned. “The woman who took away the clouds?” she asks. She is still a detective, after all. Fondness blooms under his ribcage like a thorny rose, painful to touch. 

He thinks that if Astrid were to have met them as he has, they would be her friends too. He thinks she would not mind, now, if he told them her part of the story. 

He begins to untie the bandage at his wrist. 

“Not just the clouds. I was… gone. She brought me back.” _I’m sorry to do this_ , he thinks she said, just before she did so. “She used an old… very old, very ancient text. It brings,” he fumbles for the appropriate words. Astrid had been careful with her translations, but those had been stilted even in Zemnian, a language that refused to always obey Common language rules. “The spell calls the spiritual essence of another into a willing body. It requires a sacrifice on the part of the caster.” 

“They’re very ancient writings,” Astrid tells Bren. She is arguing her thesis and he is arguing with her. “It’s hard to tell what’s mythology and what’s actual magic.” 

“If it’s actual magic, wouldn’t it still appear, in some function, in more modern spells?” He likes her ideas, but he likes watching the heat of competition rise in her cheeks even more. Eodwulf, buried in his own research, ignores their byplay. 

“The practice died out a long time ago.” She jumps for papers. She doesn’t need them - the knowledge is already in her head. But it gives her something to do with her hands. “No, ‘died’ is not quite accurate. It fell out of style. There are words like ‘dishonorable.’ ‘Crafty.’ Does that mean it is craft- _ed_? Or is it meant to convey sneakiness?” Astrid has procured the translated documents, but she doesn't trust others' translations. She is learning the entire language to try to gain a more accurate and magically-inclined understanding. Bren should be amazed by this, but he isn’t. They are geniuses, and this is Astrid. 

Caleb can tell by the blank, waiting stares that he has not explained it well. He continues to unwrap the bandage, and tries again. “The spell supposes that each person has a spiritual consciousness. It is, um… esoteric. Not, uh, translatable.” 

“Like a soul?” asks Jester. 

Caleb hesitates. It is not quite the same. 

Beau says, intense, intrigued, “Did she put your soul back in your body?” 

“Ah,” says Caleb. “Not my body. Hers.” 

Bren crosses his arms and fakes disinterest. “What’s so sneaky about these spells?” 

Astrid’s eyes flash at the challenge, but she is a fourteen year-old genius and too mature to let herself be baited. “The writers of these texts may be referring to their own cultural biases in their response to the spells.” She drops the papers and begins to pace. She gestures as she talks. In a year this habit will be trained out of her. She will become more self-contained. A whip coiled. Kinetic energy waiting to be unleashed. “They seem to have placed high meaning on spirituality and the mind-body connection. These spells actively break that connection. For example, one allows a person to supplant one soul in a different person’s body.” 

Bren’s curiosity is truly piqued. “Do you have that spell?” 

In two years, only Astrid’s eyes would gleam with triumph. In one year, she would be learning how to straighten her smile. Now, she grins with all the naivety of a student who has not yet encountered Herr Ikathon. “Not yet.” 

Caleb finishes unwrapping the bandage and bares his arm to the gaze of his friends. The wounds do not feel freer at being exposed. They still do not bleed well. They still do not heal. “If I remember correctly, and I probably do, they will not close at all until…” He almost softens the blow. At the last second he resolves himself and continues to tell the truth. “Until certain people, of importance to the caster, are dead.” 

Beau, with her circlet of wisdom, is quickest on the draw. Beau who will sit in a library for hours, whose eyes light up when she is following a trail of knowledge, whose hands are calm as she argues her theory. She says, “So you have to kill people on Astrid’s hit list.” 

Fjord performs one of his full-body eyerolls. "Beauregard," he sighs. 

Caleb cuts him off. "No, she is right." 

He realizes, once he gathers his ragged wits about him, that they will know what Astrid has done. They will know that he is alive and, if not completely sane, then at least possessing some of his old skill. 

They will be looking for a woman with short hair. They will be looking for an evocation wizard. 

He has a decision to make. He has been given debts. Revenge not his own wrings blood from his arm. 

It takes him three months to gather and steal the necessary materials to summon his familiar. 

There is a woman. Her eyes are blue, and glassy, and familiar. 

Bren is looking in a mirror. 

There is a woman. He knows her. 

“Astrid?” says Bren, only his tongue is thick in his mouth and his voice is gone. Only the soft s of her name escapes him. 

She looks different. Her hair? Her clothes are nicer, more… grown-up. More official. There is a burn mark on her neck. 

The room is white and bare. A bed lines one wall. He is seated in front of a dresser that bears the aforementioned mirror. On the floor is an array drawn in red. In the middle of the circle is one chair, and on that chair a body which is becoming more aware by the moment. Bren feels his consciousness returning, like sun scattering wisps of fog. He blinks rapidly. 

Astrid, mouths Bren. Astrid's mouth in the mirror shapes her own name.

He leans forward and presses his fingertips to the mirror. He slides his fingers down her nose, across the fine smattering of freckles, stopping shy of her mouth. 

He is waking up now. He takes in the room again, looking for meaning instead of facts. The room is white and bare, and cold, and cheap. No one has repainted these walls in some time. The window is open: the source of the cold. A bird is trilling its song into the chilly air. It is spring. The breeze carries the faintest scent of heather. It is this, the sense-memory, that tells Bren in an instant where he is. 

The circle painted on the floor is not familiar, but the components are. Bren cannot decode the symbols right now. He makes sure to burn them into his memory. 

A book is lying open on his lap. On Astrid’s lap. He reads the instruction written in her spindly handwriting. 

In another ten minutes, he is slipping out the side entrance and into the forest, the book under his arm and his heart in his new throat. 

The Mighty Nein visit the asylum to find a foreign queen’s symbol of power. Of all the paths they travel, of all the turns Bren’s life has taken. All the distance he has put between himself and this place, and still this is where he is led. The heather is dead at this time of year. Even so, Bren knows this place as he knows no other. 

Astrid’s body stands across a room from Eodwulf, who says, “Hello Bren,” and the man who is called Caleb wants to throw up.


	2. Chapter 2

**“It is a good thing/ To escape from death, but it is not great pleasure/ To bring death to a friend.” - Antigone**

“So, what happened to your body?” Beauregard asks. 

“You can’t just ask that,” Nott hisses, but she looks at Caleb curiously too. 

Caleb has thought about this extensively. “I do not mind,” he says. “I believe I died.” 

“You _believe?_ ” Fjord repeats. Caleb catalogues the furrows in Fjord’s brows. He is incredulous, Caleb decides, in the way Fjord often is in the face of the unexpected. 

Jester’s eyes are big and sorrowful. “You don’t _know?_ ” 

“I don’t remember.” 

He has made the decision to be truthful. Back around the time when Mollymauk died, when he realized why he was staying with these people -- friends -- he made the deliberate choice to give them more of himself. So he does not tell Jester about his parents, or the fire he set, but he does give a true answer to her question. 

He doesn’t remember dying. 

He remembers the fire taking hold of his home. The screams from within. The sudden confusion, dread, nausea. He remembers something within his mind, some vital structure, simply folding in on itself. And then… 

He wonders if he ran into the fire. If he scorched his hands trying to pull the wagon away from the door. If Eodwulf tackled him, or if his childhood friends stood away and watched him doom himself. If he tore at the wooden planks of the house until he too caught fire. If Astrid took pity on him and ended him with a simple bolt. 

To his new friends he says, “Astrid’s ritual is predicated on the separation of soul and body. I do not believe that it would have worked if I was still alive.” 

She positioned the chair facing the mirror. Bren returned to life in Astrid’s body, facing the mirror; ergo, Astrid faced herself as she performed the ritual. 

She would have looked herself in the eye. She half-created the ritual - brought it back to life from scraps of parchment and vague folktales. She knew the sacrifice it would take from her. In every sense possible, she went through with it with clear sight. 

Caleb re-reads her book less often now. Usually, when he is up late scribbling, he uses his own book. He reads her inscription occasionally. 

Bren was obviously Astrid’s only choice. He may never know the full truth of her imprisonment in the asylum. One thing he does know is that Astrid saw the toll and paid the price with her eyes open. 

You for her? A pathetic trade. You, what are you? A worm, a disgusting louse. You burned your parents. Your mother and father. You think you can atone for this? Never. 

She didn’t know what she was doing when she revived you. She must have been truly desperate - truly scraping the bottom of the barrel. If she had thought for a second she would have remembered - you - 

You fucking ingrate. You’re disgusting. You breathe, in her body? How dare you. 

Nott finds him, after his confession to the group. Well, Veth finds him. He should get used to referring to her by that name. 

“So what’s your plan?” she asks. She glances at him sidelong. “With Astrid’s hit list. Are you going to carry it out?” 

“I have my own plans.” 

“Right.” Veth looks subdued. She fiddles with a button. Caleb remembers when she found it (he remembers everything) -- it was really just sitting by the side of the road between the towns Rivvenrath and Twolle. Nott had looked really happy for the first time since he had met her. So excited over a lost button. “Look, Caleb! It’s my lucky button.” 

She is Veth now, Caleb reminds himself. She was always Veth, even back on that road.

Veth says, “I know I’ve pushed you to be stronger, and I didn’t really think you minded because it seemed like that was something you wanted, but… this seems different. Is this what you want?” 

Caleb shakes his head sharply. He cannot, words cannot -- there aren’t proper words for what he wants to do with magic. When he feels it thrum through his arms -- he wishes he could let Nott into Astrid’s body for a moment to show her what it feels like. What it could _be_. 

“Don’t you want to get revenge on them -- on Ikathon especially? I know I would.” Nott clenches her fists. She has just trusted the Mighty Nein with her history. The familiar grimace on her face has a story, now. It is not self-loathing, as Caleb had assumed; Nott, Veth, trembles with rage. She has revenge in her blood with nowhere to direct it. 

Bren searches for this boiling temper in himself. He finds nothing but bone-deep weariness, and fear. 

“I have plans of my own.” Plans that involve becoming very, very powerful before he ever faces his torturers again. “I… do not know if it is churlish of me to put off her agenda.” 

Nott turns to face him fully. “Maybe your agendas overlap.” She swallows and continues quietly, “Astrid obviously felt like she couldn’t turn to anyone she knew. Don’t you want to... Don't you think your enemies are already hers?” 

Trent never shies from foreign magics. Bren would not respect Trent as much as he did if this was so. 

Bren has experienced enough slights as a boy of the Zemni Fields, whose local folklore and folk magic is outdated and old-fashioned. Other students roll their eyes. Professors steer him obviously toward more “civilized” spellwork. One teacher seems surprised every time Bren wraps his Zemnian tongue around Common spellwords, constantly praising him for his articulation. Despite Bren’s status as a prodigy. Despite his enrollment in the advanced course. 

Professor Ikathon encourages research into foreign or overlooked magic cultures. He likes his students to be well-read. He likes to have a challenge, he says early in their mentorship, after Bren begins to argue with him on the origins of transmutation incantations but shuts himself up, cheeks flaming. 

No race is too unfavorable, no culture too backward, as long as it has knowledge to give. And Bren burns for knowledge, as does Astrid, as does Ikathon. 

He dreams that Astrid’s hands move without his permission. In the dream, they only reach to take something from Fjord. Harmless. But he wakes up with dread at the back of his throat because he knows this is only the beginning of his loss of control, he knows he will hurt those he loves. One day her hands will reach for something he holds dear, and her tongue will speak spells he does not intend, and he will lose everything again -- 

It is only a dream. He knows from the first instant of waking that it was a dream. But the thought is with him from that moment. 

“The first thing I saw was this.” Caleb tilts his head up and traces the burn scar on Astrid’s neck. It still feels strange to touch his throat and feel no Adam’s apple. “I don’t remember what happened after I… when I died. But I can guess. Astrid made sure I got the message.” 

“That’s a good message,” Caduceus says. He looks like he’s going to repeat himself, but instead nods thoughtfully. “I think, though, that’s not the only message she gave you.” 

Warily, Caleb searches Caduceus’ face for clues. This riddling is tiring. Has him on edge. 

“You said you saw herself in the mirror, right?” 

Caleb nods slowly. “Ja. She was, she positioned herself to face the mirror.” They had been soldiers together. Astrid had given him all the intel as quickly as possible. Array, body, notebook. 

“Most people who commit suicide close their eyes,” says Caduceus easily. “She made sure she couldn’t look away. So maybe she was giving you another message. That she knew exactly what she was doing.” 

It is a bit of a joke, naming his spells after Widogast. 

After all, he is Bren and this body is Astrid’s. Caleb Widogast does not exist except for a common knowledge shared by a group of people, and four spells that bear his name. 

Veth grouches at him about it. He grins but does not explain himself.

The Mighty Nein have long discussions about what happens if Ikathon and his ilk don’t die. Caleb volunteers that his aim is to see them stopped, not dead. Astrid’s wishes are not fully his own. He can wear bandages over his arms. 

He omits this truth: the gouges are growing wider. Within the last year, each one has grown to wrap around the circumference of his arm. He wonders with idle morbidity if he will lose the arm. Maybe he will be ripped apart in one violent burst -- it would be better if it happened at night, so no one would have to see it. Why was he so reluctant to leave early on in their time together? It would make this so much easier if he had never tied himself to them. 

He pulls Veth aside one day. She looks at him knowingly -- like she has been expecting this. Is she always waiting for him to leave her? 

“Veth,” he begins. He had a speech planned. He simply looks at her -- all three and a half feet of her, brown skin, luminous brown eyes. 

“Caleb?” 

“We have been through a lot together, you and I.” She nods. “I have asked you, before, if you would leave with me. And I don’t mean to ask that again,” he adds quickly. “Because you have a family that you need to get back to. But I need to be sure. That you will be okay if _I_ leave.” 

“You’re not,” Veth says quickly, a question and a statement. 

“Not intentionally.” 

Veth’s eyes search his. He lets her look. “Is this about the curse thing? Astrid’s spell?” 

He fiddles with his bandages and doesn’t say _no._ “None of us knows what will happen in this fight. But even if we do win, I do not know what happens when the requirements of the spell are satisfied.” 

“You mean you could just drop dead?” 

He quirks his mouth to show how un-funny this is. “It’s possible.” 

“That won’t happen. We’ll rez you. I’ll find another body!” 

He folds Astrid’s arms around her. Veth’s blunt, claw-less fingers clutch the back of his shirt. Caleb closes his eyes and wonders if it matters whose body this is, if it cries when he says goodbye. 

Trent brings them to the asylum when their research can no longer be contained by theory. There are plenty of bodies to cut open, to see how magic can affect the liver, the heart. Bren learns how to wear an apron properly. Learns not to scratch his nose when he is wrist-deep in gore. Learns how to map the precious and fragile interior of the human body. The veins fascinate him most: how they look like roots with no soil, spreading throughout the body as if always searching in vain for sun or earth. 

Bren holds a lung in his hand. This is not so remarkable, except that he breathes with his own lungs at the same time. His own body has never seemed so… plain. Nothing separates him from this body on the table, except that his spirit was somehow born into a body that grew up in the Zemni Fields. The life that has brought him to this moment, standing over a body with a lung in his hand, is pure circumstance. 

When he looks up, Ikathon is smiling at him. “You understand now,” he says. “The power we have is too valuable to be wasted.” 

He gently motions for Bren to replace the lung. He does so. Ikathon casts _Revivify_. 

Beauregard corners him very neatly. He does not see it coming. When the Mighty Nein split into groups, Beauregard makes sure to assign herself and Caleb to reconnaissance of the wizard towers where Ikathon does his work. 

When she squats down next to him and peers out the window nonchalantly, he knows something is coming. 

“Hey,” says Beauregard. She waits for him to greet her in return before barreling into the topic he thought they’d all left behind. “So what if you aren’t dead? Hear me out,” she added, although Caleb had made no move to stop her. “You said you kind of ‘broke’ after… you know. What if that was just your, like, mind? Or soul?” 

“You think my soul left my… my body,” Caleb says slowly. He takes care not to refer to it as “my old body.” That would open doors to thoughts he is not ready to walk through. Not yet. 

“You said the spell was hard to translate, right? So what if what we refer to as a ‘soul’ is, like, presence of mind?” Beauregard is making big gestures with her arms. Caleb is not sure it helps explain her idea. “So when you ‘break,’ your spirit becomes untethered, and that makes it available to put into a different body.” 

Caleb thinks about his own body lying somewhere without him for sixteen years. 

“Oh, shit,” he hears Beauregard say distantly. “Caleb, are you okay?” 

When their interest turns to the effect on live bodies, there are plenty of those too. And then, when their research demands experimentation on magic users, they three are willing to offer themselves up on the asylum table like a sacrificial altar. Finding other willing wizards is too tedious. _We’re already here, aren’t we_ , they say to each other in a glance. Simple logic. 

Bren lies on the table with straps holding him down. The window is open, allowing a cool breeze to accompany Ikathon as he readies his instruments. The scent of heather, clear and calming, fills his lungs. 

Caleb can’t ignore the irony that Ikathon’s own body seems to be failing him. 

Up close, Trent’s eyes are faintly yellow. Kidney poisoning, probably. His fingers hold the faintest tremble -- so slight, but Bren studied for many years under this man and has been looking for weaknesses for longer than he realized. He catalogues this tell instantly. So, Ikathon is waning? He will probably try to end the fight quickly. 

Caleb doesn’t try to lower his voice as he brings out his copper wire. “Take cover,” he tells Beauregard. 

“Bren,” says Ikathon calmly. It strikes Caleb that he is in a borrowed body and still Ikathon’s eyes cut to his marrow. Ikathon catalogues Caleb’s weaknesses in return, each of them aching and prominent. Ikathon knows his history -- he shaped much of it. He knows Bren’s grasping need for power and the things he is willing to do for it. Even after all this time, that part of him still exists. It is quiet, but it is there. 

Ikathon knows the dark parts of him better than anyone else. Even Veth, with her rage and her kindness, will never understand him this way. 

Caleb focuses on breathing. “Archmage,” he says courteously. The trembling in his voice might be mistaken for a sneer, if one is feeling charitable and ignores his pale face. 

Caleb abruptly finds his view of Ikathon blocked by a wall of solid, muscled barbarian. “You don’t get to talk to him,” says Yasha. She reaches behind her and unsheathes Skingorger in a slow whistle of metal on metal. “I’d like to talk with you, though.” 

Caleb holds a form letter in his hands. _We regret to inform you that Ms. Baasch passed away some time ago. Please direct any further inquiries..._

“Please don’t be mad, Caleb,” begs Jester. “You mentioned Astrid, when we were, you know, dancing one time. Nott and I thought…” 

The cuts on his arm, on Astrid’s arm, pulse in time with his heartbeat. He struggles to find words. “Why,” is all he can say. “Why have you-- Nott. Do you know what you have done?” 

“I’m sorry, Caleb,” Nott squeaks. “You just seemed-- Astrid seemed like she was really important to you, and. I just want you to be happy!” She says this last defiantly. Then deflates. “I’m sorry.” 

He wants to vomit. He wants to run. He wants to shake apart until nothing is left of him but bone-dust. 

He tries to rein himself in. The metaphor is apt -- he feels like a wild horse, shaking and foaming with exertion. Of course Nott has no idea what she’s done. She has no idea who Astrid is. Was. How could she know whose interest might be caught by a letter to a dead woman? 

Astrid’s brain, always so responsive to his thoughts, finds the sense-memory of Ikathon’s eyes on him, expectant. He shudders. 

Astrid kisses him when they are both fifteen. Bren leans into the kiss for too long, afraid to open his eyes. When he finally does, Astrid is looking at him unflinchingly, as he knew she would. 

“So what is this for?” he asks. He means to murmur it intimately -- passionately, even -- but his voice is crumbly and dry. 

“Nothing,” says Astrid. “I did it because I wanted to.” 

Martinet Ludineth’s distant attack rips up the ground for forty feet in all directions. Caleb leaps to avoid a rock jutting out of the earth, and comes face-to-face with Eodwulf. 

His old friend bares his teeth and doesn’t waste time on conversation. His fist swings by Caleb’s jaw, just a hair’s breadth from shattering his skull. It seems Eodwulf has been keeping up with his fighter’s training. He gets in an extra hit before Caleb can back away, punching the air out of Caleb’s lungs. 

Caleb crumples to his knees. He feels faraway, the kind of dissociation that usually comes with fire. He has a strange, dizzied conviction that Wulf’s fist knocked his spirit out of Astrid’s body along with his breath. 

Jester’s double sneaks up behind Eodwulf and distracts him with a razor-edged lollipop. Caleb breathes himself back into this body he’s wearing. He shakes off the dizziness. 

“Eodwulf,” he says. The other man turns to him, still silent. “Do you regret it?” 

“I regret very little.” Eodwulf’s voice is deeper than he remembers. So much has passed since they last spoke. 

“Whatever Astrid did to rupture your relationship…” He sees Eodwulf’s jaw tighten. “Whatever she did to inspire Trent’s wrath. It pushed her too far.” With difficulty, Caleb meets Eodwulf’s eyes. He remembers his own death: fire, screaming, and then -- nothing. “She should not have been alone, at the end.” 

Eodwulf doesn’t attack him for that, as Caleb thought he would. His lips peel back from his teeth in chilly disgust. Over the last fifteen years, Wulf has learned restraint. “She should have taken the punishment and be done with it,” he says. “She put too much stock in herself. She was so proud of her experiments. She forgot how to listen.” 

“To orders?” 

“To Ikathon. Everything we were was due to him. There is no need for the individual, only the soldier.” Eodwulf’s gaze becomes too much, too strong. Caleb has to look away. “You forgot too. Now I’ll put you both down, and put an end to this insubordination.” 

In a small inland city, a barkeep’s eye waits on him expectantly, so he says, “Ah, I am --” Bren. “Lukas.” The social gesture makes the gnome smile more readily and offer him a room. 

On a dusty road to Trostenwold, he introduces himself to a family as Alex. He meets a Raf and tucks that name away for the future. 

He is Kai in one town, Simon in another, Percy on a road in-between the two. 

He has a vague notion that he should try female names, out of respect for Astrid. Perhaps strangers would buy it. He tries Elena. It doesn’t feel right. He lets this notion slide away. 

He gets caught trying to slide incense into his coat and flees without giving a name, though the shopkeeper will ask around and find out that a Mr. Tam stayed the night at a local inn. 

He learns sleight of hand and steals more names, introducing himself as Jan, as Kai. He sleeps on the sides of roads and thinks up surnames. 

He gets caught with a book that isn’t technically his. The crownsguard don’t ask his name, the jailers don’t care, and so the next person who asks is a tiny goblin girl who’s also locked up for having sticky fingers. He has no idea that the answer he gives, pulled randomly from his list, will become _his_ in a way that nothing has been since he was fourteen and his new teacher said “Bren, is it? I look forward to working with you.” 

After the battle, Caleb focuses on his breathing. He lets Caduceus’ healing magic wash over him. He is still in this body. He has all his limbs. Frumpkin is -- ah, there he is. Good cat. 

He doesn’t spare a thought for Ikathon until he turns his head and sees Yasha closing the corpse’s eyes. Caleb turns his head away again. He is too tired to figure out an emotion about that. 

Yasha trudges over to the group. “Sorry,” she says quietly to Caleb. “I felt like he was watching me. He was kind of creepy.” 

“That is putting it mildly,” Caleb mutters back. 

“Fuck,” says Beau. She holds the broken pieces of her bo staff in her hands. “Fuck, man.” 

“I’m sorry, Beau,” says Jester. She wipes blood off her face with her sleeve. The rest of her dress was already ruined. “We’ll get you another one, okay?” 

“No ribbons,” says Beau. 

Jester smiles a little, too exhausted to tease. “Fine.” 

Beau looks at Caleb. “So?” she asks expectantly. She snaps her fingers and points at his arm. “So?!” 

Everyone turns toward him. Yasha says “Oh…” quietly. 

“Ah,” says Caleb. “Yes.” He reaches for the bandages. 

“Before you unwrap that,” says Fjord hastily, “I just wanna say, these fuckers were _evil_ and I’m glad we killed them anyway. Even without the, you know,” he nods toward Caleb’s arm, “fucked-up blood pact or whatever.” 

“Agreed,” says Caleb. “However, I would like to know if I am not going to explode.” 

“Say what?” says Beau. 

Oops. He did not really mean to let loose with his theory. He avoids looking at Veth, who makes some unconvincing throat-clearing noises. 

He unwraps the bandages, clumsy in his exhaustion. Four of the gouges on his arm have disappeared. He strokes the skin, a little dazed. No scars. 

There is still one mark left. 

Astrid’s thesis on that ritual may have been the reason Ikathon found them. Bren never wonders. Caleb, however, sometimes does. Sometimes he wishes he could find whatever alerted Professor Ikathon to them, and rip it out by its roots. 

How long ago was it that they had tried to sneak into a hospital? Astrid’s mind obligingly finds the memories for him: Molly with the grotesque venereal disease, Fjord climbing out a window, and an orderly’s extremely unimpressed face when confronted with Nott pretending to be a baby. The absolute disaster and hilarity of it all, back when the Mighty Nein were just a collection of weirdos finding weird things to do. Jester had looked at them with such misplaced trust and asked, “So you guys pretended to be, like a doctor, right? And went in and asked for him?” 

This time, they take Jester’s advice, and walk into the asylum and ask to see a nurse. She takes them to Bren’s body. 

His skin is paler than it ever was when he was ali-- before he was gone-- back when he was using his body. What is the proper terminology here, Caleb thinks to himself. The hair is still faintly red, but faded from lack of sun. Everything about this body is faded. 

Caleb refuses the nurse’s offer to turn down the bedsheets. They have told her they are performing a spell on this man to try to revive him, and she probably thinks she can help, but Caleb has no desire to see the results of the experiments this body was surely used for. He remembers being fifteen years old and holding a lung in his own bloody hand. 

Veth steals her hand into his. “You’re the last one who has to die?” 

How long has she been waiting for him to leave her? 

“Ja,” says Caleb, the sound dragged out of him, heavy as a boulder. “It seems so.” 

When Professor Ikathon taught them to resist and endure, it was painful. It was necessary. It was done for the good of their country. And, despite the pain, it ended. 

This is nothing like that. 

Why me? he asks Astrid this sometimes. He has not written it in her journal yet but he asks sometimes, on his long wanderings. He has nowhere to go, no plan in mind, no allies to gather. He watches his feet on the ground and wonders why him, why this broken memory of a boy Astrid knew in her youth. What was she hoping he could do that another could not? 

Sometimes the weight of living is too much and his question changes. Why trap me here? Why give me this body, so heavy in its breathing and so messy in its blood and shit and phlegm? Why could I not rest? 

He does not know Astrid’s answer to this. He knows his own answer: he does not deserve to rest. 

The cuts on his arm do not heal, and he continues to walk the world in this coffin, this body.

“With this kind of unconscious state it’s usually tricky,” says Caduceus, “because we can’t be sure if the person will return. And if they don’t, it can be hard to know what their wishes are. But.” He gestures to Caleb. “We know that Caleb doesn’t want to return to this body. And unless you’d like someone else to inhabit it…?” 

Caleb shakes his head firmly. He does not want to learn Bren’s thirty-six year-old body. He does not want to discover how time has rusted his left knee, which always popped when he stood too fast, even when he was sixteen. He does not want to live in Bren’s body. It is already torture living in Bren’s head. 

Caduceus nods. “Then it seems pretty simple to let his body return to the ground and begin to replenish the earth.” 

It does seem simple. 

“Are we sure that it won’t kill his soul, too?” asks Veth sharply. They’ve been talking about this for twenty-six minutes. Caleb is ready to kill his body himself if it means he could just get out of this room. 

“As far as I understand it, the spell literally operates on the separation of body and soul,” says Beau. She produces her notebook from… somewhere. 

“I have studied Astrid’s notes extensively,” Caleb says. “You are correct. There should be no feedback from one to the other.” Beau scrutinizes him and puts her notebook away. She doesn’t ask him if he’s sure. Some time ago she would have argued with him extensively, to the detriment of them both. A little less time ago she would have debated him. Now she trusts him. She will plant herself by his side to assist him, even without yet knowing his decision. 

He looks to Caduceus. Another friend. How strange and wonderful, to be surrounded by friends in this place. “If you will do the honors,” he says. 

When he is small, his father teaches him how to whittle. Bren watches with amazement as blocks of rough, plain wood turn into miniature animals under his father’s hands. The wood does not bend as easily in Bren’s novice hands, but he manages a passable duck. It’s the easiest animal to carve, practically an oval. The duck lives above the mantel, witnessing the years turn, watching his parents talking of the school; and him at the door to his bedroom, hearing them talk of treason. 

Bren is poor. His family is poor. His parents clothe him and feed him, yes, but he is given very little. Not for free. He is given sweets when he carries a message for a neighbor. He is given compliments when he displays intelligence. 

Bren is chosen for the academy, and arrives already knowing the lesson all ambitious students are taught: that no one will just give power to you, that you must find it and make it yourself. He also knows the untaught lesson, that nothing is given for free. Academic prowess is awarded with attention from powerful or well-connected professors. Ingenuity is rewarded with special tutelage from Professor Ikathon. And power from Ikathon, spells and secrets, are given in return for loyalty. 

What he is truly given is this: a knife. A tool to carve opportunity out of nothing. 

Caleb sits on a bench in a garden with heather planted all around him, and counts the things he has been given. 

Here are the tangible: A kiss. A journal. A button. A spell scroll. A fancy dress suit. 

And the intangible: An opportunity. A second chance. Forgiveness, however unwillingly received. 

How to count the things he has taken, things he has made for himself? More opportunities when others would not give them freely. A coat with pockets for spell components. Buttons for his first friend in a long time. 

Is this body a gift, or has he stolen it? Or is he still shaping it into something that will be his? 

Caleb will not kill his old body, although he hates it -- those are the hands that killed his parents. But hate is secondary. This is about letting go. 

Perhaps this is what Astrid saw in the mirror before she died. He thinks she whispered something to him -- _“I’m sorry to do this to you.”_ She had been kind, in the end. She had been too much of a soldier to live with herself, and too much of an individual for Ikathon to want her, but kind enough to apologize to a person she once kissed simply because she wanted to. She had given him power that day, without asking for anything in return, which was foolish. She had done it anyway, because she had wanted to. 

Caleb is practical, like a soldier. He does not need his body anymore. He does not want it, and neither does anyone else. He is learning to be an individual, whatever that means to a person wearing a hand-me-down body. If he can do those things, it is no large feat to be kind to himself. 

He sits on a bench in the garden, among the heather, until the last wound on his arm disappears.

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you think! I haven't published in a while and it's so nice to hear from readers.


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